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I dont watch that much reality TV. Although I am hooked on Intervention . And I did go to a friends house to watch the season closer of The Bachelor.But for the most part, the stuff slithers past me . Until today. Because I just read a review of a new show in the L.A. Times that provides the first really concrete reason to stand behind reality shows as a genre.Below is the article that caught my eye. The premise of the show is another behind the scenes glimpse of a pair of young newlyweds. Bla bla bla. Soon they will be taking out mutual restraining orders. Read more

I have two nephews. They used to visit in tandem, every summer, along with my brother (who is their father.) When this all started they were four and six. Now the youngest one is seventeen. I think this has something to do with an odd phenomenon this branch of my family suffers from, known as ‘the aging process’ . Luckily it is something to which I am totally immune. Anyway, this was the first year that all the visits are separate. When it used to be all three of them at once, before they arrived I would ask my brother for a grocery shopping list because his sons are nothing if not extraordinarily specific about their taste in everything. Then, for the weeks that they would be here, my cupboards would be full of stuff like this: Read more

I have begun the difficult but necessary task of making a corporate montage for my dog. This early draft only scratches the surface of what the corporation can provide for investors. In the future we are expecting a lot more “media integration” Like they had for Michael Jackson. Read more

Last night I cooked a squash in the oven. This morning, I discovered this lighter than air blob of stuff in a pan on one of the lower racks; a porous charcoal cloud that I bet doesn’t weigh a whole ounce. It looks like what you feel like you shed once your depression has lifted. Or the thing you got rid of when you finally stopped worrying. Or maybe its that thing that dissolved when you woke up from a nightmare. I guess I ought to throw it away. So I took this picture. Read more

Its the fourth of July weekend. What that used to mean to me, when I was single, was the beginning of the downhill slide to Christmas. Because July seemed to go by in such a rapid flash that the next thing I knew, it was the part of August where the fences for the Halloween pumpkin lots started going up. Well, come on. They have to start in August because it takes at least 60 days to get ready for Halloween. Of course, once its Halloween, then its also basically the first day of the five months of Christmas. Happily,these days Christmas doesn’t cause me the same anxiety . So I am starting the beginning of this fourth of July weekend by celebrating my new purchase from Trader Joe’s: Rambutan. Thank God they are finally selling it. Because we all didn’t really have enough choices for snacks before. “Not just sweet or tart or even a combination of the two, the Japanese ‘fifth flavor’ known as Umami.” is what it says on the back of the package. I don’t know if Umami is the Japanese way of saying “Yo Mama.” But I can tell you what freeze dried Rambutan tastes like: A very old piece of toast and jam. Like if you made yourself some and got it all slathered up but had to run out of the house and forgot to eat it. Then a week later, you found it behind something and decided that you were so desperate for a hit of flavor that you would taste it, even though you knew better. Now with new freeze dried Rambutan, you don’t have to wait that hellish week for the bread to turn an odd combination of sweet and spongy ! I don’t know if the big Rambutan shipment is selling but I do know the reason I own this pack is because I consider it part of my job, as a cataloguer of Americana, to make a point of trying to own one of every weird thing that goes up for sale in the supermarket.Read more